Class
of 28 | For Margaret Peg Wettlin Ed28, who died September
1 at her home in West Philadelphia, the desire for an identity with
something bigger than myself began in a classroom at Penn. As she
described in her vivid memoir, Fifty Russian Winters: An American
Womans Life in the Soviet Union, it was a freshman-year lecture
in General History that marked her first step toward questioning
American government, society, and herself. And ironically, Wettlin
learned the tenets of socialism in economics classes at Penn.

The
tendency was toward the repudiation of these principles, but the very
denial of an idea involves the statement of it, and I, who had never
heard radical ideas before, felt that new planets were swimming into
my ken, she wrote. By 1932, as a high-school teacher in Media, Pennsylvania,
the 25-year-old Wettlin was living through the Depression and trying
on the role of socialist herselfalbeit one who preferred to learn
from life experience rather than by reading political and economic
theory by Marx or Engels. Who were these Russians who had taken upon
themselves the task of building a new society? she wondered.

That September, against the wishes of her parents and employer, she
sailed for Russia, intending to stay a year. She remained there for
48.

If Wettlin was not wholly a socialist, she was certainly an idealist.
Soon after her arrival, she met another in Andrei Efremoff, a young
theater director and protégé of the Method Acting giant Konstantin
Stanislavsky, who had co-founded the Moscow Art Theater to great acclaim
in 1897. Although not a Communist, Efremoff supported the revolution,
seeing it less as a political or economic movement than as one that
offered personal freedom for individuals and artists. Wettlin viewed
the new social order as a practical fresh startfor the Russian people
and for herself. She found a job outside Moscow teaching the children
of American automobile plant workers, even as her romance with Efremoff
deepened.

In 1934, she and Efremoff married and set off for Outer Mongolia,
where he had been commissioned to help create a revolutionary national
theater in the capital city of Ulan Bator. Eager to explore the Gobi
Desert, Wettlin accompanied her husband and a party of documentary
filmmakers on a truncated expedition that ended with her contracting
a devastating case of typhoid fever and losing the baby she had not
known she was carrying.

After the couples return to Moscow in 1935 and the birth of a healthy
son, Wettlin made her first (and what turned out to be only for many
more years) visit to her homeland in July 1936. Former college friends
from Penn had arranged a lecture tour, which was so successful that
plans were made for a second trip.

However, when Wettlin attempted to renew her Russian residence permit
later that year, she learned that Stalins government had decreed
that foreigners living in the Soviet Union would be required to take
out Soviet citizenshipor leave the country. Stunned, but deeply in
love with her husband and devoted to their year-old son, Wettlin chose
to become a Russian citizen.

As an increasingly paranoid Stalin initiated an escalating series
of purges, Wettlin was unexpectedly chosen by the Soviet secret
service to become an informant, an assignment of which even her husband
remained unaware. The work began seemingly innocently, as she was
instructed to converse with neighbors, friends, and colleagues about
their jobs and other mundane topics, then share that information
with the authorities. But ultimately that led to the unexplained arrests
and disappearances of people she knew.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Wettlin,
who had been teaching at the Foreign Language Institute in the capital,
began writing and reporting for Radio Moscow. With the city under
siege, she and Efremoff began an arduous odyssey that would take them
and their two children from the city of Nalchik in the Caucasus, across
the Caspian Sea to Siberia and Chuvashia, before finally, after two
harrowing years as refugees, coming home to Moscow.

After the war, with Stalin still in power, the freedom and personal
welfare of Soviet citizens failed to improve, frustrating the couple
and their children. Wettlin became a well-paid translator of Russian
literature, specializing in the writings of Maxim Gorky, as Efremoff
continued to work in theater. Then, for a second time, she was pressed
into service with the Soviet secret police, a dark period she recalled
in her memoir as slipping into an abyss of evil fueled by the credo
of the end justifying the means: Between bright moments of seeing
the light I had traveled down tunnels of self-deception. As the late
Harrison Salisbury noted in his introduction to Fifty Russian Winters,
Wettlins decision to terminate her association with the KGB, while
personally cleansing, could have cost her her life.

Efremoff died in 1968. Wettlin continued to work as a translator (her
translations of Gorky, Pasternak, and other Russian writers remain
widely available and highly regarded), and produced a book on the
19th-century Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, fulfilling a
promise to her late husband.

In 1973-74, encouraged by American family members and old friends
from Penn, including classmate Helen Minton FA28 and her husband
Harold (both now deceased), Wettlin visited her homeland for the first
time since 1936, and decided to return permanently. It would be another
six years before her repatriation, when the State Department determined
that she had become a Soviet citizen in the 1930s under duress,
and granted her and her family U.S. citizenship. Wettlin, accompanied
by her daughter Dasha and grandson Fedya, returned to Philadelphia
in 1980. Her son, Andrei Jr., remained in the Soviet Union with his
wife and children for another seven years before arriving in America
in 1987.

Wettlins youthful desire for an identity with something bigger than
myself came full-circle in the writing of Fifty Russian Winters
(published in 1992),a tale she felt she could not safely tell
until the advent of glasnost ended the fear of reprisals for
family and friends left behind. Although she had gone to Russia in
the 1930s in search of the new Russian republic, she told the Gazette
in 1980 that she now believed that the individual is the only thing
in the world. Theres nothing but you and me and our individual
fates and our individual survivals and understandings There is no
such thing as an abstraction called the people.